


everywhere and in-between

by cestmabiologie



Category: The Haunting of Hill House (TV 2018)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-20 02:05:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16546733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cestmabiologie/pseuds/cestmabiologie
Summary: It's 1996. Shirley doesn't know how to take care of everyone, and she hasn't figured out how to take care of herself yet either. She's trying.





	everywhere and in-between

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: body horror, references to drug use, and one really terrible kiss.
> 
> I wrote this after watching only the first half of the season, and I'm sure I am going to have to rewrite it after I watch the second half. That's okay!

1996.

* * *

 

Something from a dream:

 

Her mom is in the garden. She has her sunhat and her gloves and her trowel. When she notices Shirley she’s smiling, but her mouth says _help me_. Shirley takes a step toward her and she drops the trowel and screams. When she rushes forward it gets worse. Her mom’s body wrenches like she’s held by buried invisible hooks and every time Shirley moves they rip through her. Shirley takes another step and she can hear the cartilage pop of her mom’s shoulders dislocating. Her arms dangle, her fingers curl. Her eyes are rimmed with blood.

 

Her mouth says _help me_.

 

Something real:

 

The worst part about waking up in the middle of the night isn’t not knowing where you are or what’s real. It’s the way the shadows make everything you know look strange. A face on your poster is someone watching you. A chair is someone watching you. Your lamp is someone watching you. You could turn on a light and prove yourself wrong, but that would mean reaching for your lamp that’s maybe someone watching you.

 

Shirley changes her room around a little every day. She takes down the posters and spends hours peeling stickers off the walls. Most of them came from gumball machines and don’t want to come off. Her fingernails chew tiny bites around the edges and scrape away thin papery streaks. She takes to draping a scarf over her mirror at night. Theo says it looks like someone died in her room. Nelly thinks it looks mystical and tries it for a few days in her own room before she decides that it’s too much work.

 

* * *

 

“Shirley.”

 

She opens her eyes and focuses on Mr. McKenney at his desk, staring at her. The rest of the classroom is empty. She’d only closed her eyes for a second. There was no way that it had been more than a second.

 

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

 

“You haven’t been to a yearbook meeting lately. Have you sold all of your ads yet?” he asks, as if she hadn’t just been sleeping after all. She can pretend if he is going to.

 

“Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

 

He smiles an _atta girl!_ smile that she doesn’t deserve and she leaves before he can ask anything else.

 

There’s an envelope waiting for her when she gets home. It goes to the bottom of her bag with the other too-slim envelopes from colleges that don’t want her.

 

“You’re a fine student, Shirley. You work hard,” her guidance counsellor had told her a month earlier. She remembers his hands on his desk, fingers twined together.

 

“But on paper you’re average and on a pre-medical application you’re mediocre.”

 

She remembers the manila folder sitting unopened next to his hands, _Crain, Shirley_ typed onto a sticky label. She wonders what she’d have seen if she’d opened it up. Would there be a catalogue of the hours that she put into extracurriculars? Would there be newspaper clippings with the Crain name circled in red ink? With the word _haunted_ circled? A single page with the words _Crain, Shirley: average student_ in type. And in the envelopes: _We regret to inform you that your application was rejected on the grounds that you are mediocre._

 

A wave of shame starts to crest but she doesn’t let it. She got into the program that she really wanted at a private college in a nearby town. She just has to explain to everyone that she’d rather work with dead people. She won’t explain that you can’t hurt people who are already gone. You can’t cause them pain. You can only help them and help the people who love them still. It’s something that Shirley can do. It’s something that she can be good at. She’ll really work at being good.

 

Her rejections have been crushed by the copy _10,000 Dreams Interpreted_ that she’s stolen from Nell’s room. Pages have fallen out and been tucked back mostly in their rightful places. There are notes and markings in the margins that Shirley can’t decipher. These are secrets in a language Nell wrote for herself.

 

The book tells her that to see a garden in your dreams denotes great peace of mind and comfort. There isn’t anything about dreaming your dead mother torn to shreds in a bed of peonies.

 

* * *

 

Something from a dream:

 

She’s back in the house with Nelly. Nell is stretched out and older but she knows it’s her the way you just know in dreams. Nell is grabbing at her stomach like it hurts her.

 

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Shirley says. Nell tilts her head to one side as if she can’t understand what Shirley’s saying. As she does, clear liquid drools out from between her lips. Shirley catches the scent of last term’s biology lab, a cat on a tray with its ribs snipped open by snub-bladed dissection scissors, a formaldehyde stink. Her ears itch with the memory of the sound its skin made as it tore away from the muscle underneath. It hadn’t pulled away smoothly like she’d expected.

 

Plastic-filled blood vessels press up under Nell’s skin: pink for arteries and blue for veins. Her skin is so thin.

 

Luke appears behind her. He isn’t stretched out like Nelly is. He’s still himself, only his shadow is long like a different light shines on him.

 

“Tell me,” Shirley pleads. She thinks he’s about to say something, but instead ash-black fingers force his jaws open from inside. A hand reaches out of his mouth.

 

Wet footprints walk through Nell’s puddle of formaldehyde and across the room.

 

Something real:

 

Nell eats the mini-wheats dry out of the box. She always bites the frosted sides off first and lets the plain sides melt into mush on her tongue. Luke pours the milk into his cereal bowl first. He says it’s an accident, but Shirley know better. It’s an experiment to see which will happen first: will the mini-wheats absorb the milk fast enough, or will the bowl overflow?

 

* * *

 

If she’s out the door as soon as study hall starts, if she walks a little faster than what’s comfortable, she can make it to Luke and Nell’s schoolyard and back before the bell for next period. She doesn’t go every day, just when her gut urges her. Lately her gut won’t settle.

 

She finds Luke behind the school, huddled half-hidden behind a dumpster, passing a joint back to a teenager. The asphalt around the dumpster is tacky and stained. The air stinks with the sweet rot of rejected lunchbox fruit. Luke’s with a junior that she recognizes from her own classes. Rick or Randy or Robbie or something like that, in any case, not someone she’d ever go out of her way to talk to.

 

When she grabs Luke and pulls him away she’s struck that his wrist isn’t as small in her hand as she remembered. He’s still weedy, but he’ll outgrow her soon. She turns on his friend.

 

“You’re lucky I don’t call the cops.”

 

Rick-or-Randy-or-Robbie has a gap next to his left canine. It sets his smile off-centre and makes that tooth look sharper than human.

 

“My dad’s a cop. Where do you think I get this stuff?”

 

The clang of a schoolbell makes them all jump. Shirley can hear the shuffle and slam of bodies moving back into the building around the corner. Luke watches her with his fists jammed into his sweater pockets. He started wearing contacts a few weeks ago, and Shirley still isn’t used to seeing his eyes unmagnified. At least he still tilts his head back when he looks at her, peering through phantom lenses. It’s a small thing but it’s something she recognizes. If he’s embarrassed or angry she can’t read it; his face is closed to her.

 

“Go inside,” she tells him. She’s still the big sister.

 

Rick-or-Randy-or-Robbie waits with her as she watches Luke disappear around the corner. They listen together for the sound of the door clicking shut behind him.

 

“Stop giving him weed,” she says after she knows for sure Luke is gone. “He’s just a kid,”

 

“Look, he came to me. He just needed to chill out a little,” his wolf-tooth catches at his lower lip a little when he speaks.

 

“He doesn’t need to chill out. He’s eleven.”

 

“I’ve seen you around. You could use some chill yourself.”

 

She doesn’t answer fast enough and he catches on that he’s close to hitting on something.

 

“Or maybe you’re looking for something else?” he grins.

 

Her mouth feels dry. She’s not sure if she’s allowed to ask for what she wants.

 

“I don’t want to sleep,” she tells him. Out loud, it sounds pathetic.

 

“So what,” he frowns, “you want coke?”

 

“What? No. Nothing like that.” This is a mistake.

 

“Don’t act like that. I only deal in the softer side of high,” he slings his bag onto his shoulder. “Just go buy some caffeine pills.”

 

“No way, I’ve seen that episode of _Saved by the Bell._ ”

 

“So have I. They made caffeine pills look like speed,” he drops his bag off his shoulder again and fishes around inside and pulls out a blister pack of pills.

 

“They’re no big deal,” he says, rattling the packet. “Like drinking coffee. I’ll let you have these for the low, low price of one kiss.”

 

“You’re a perv.”

 

He shrugs and tucks the pack into the back pocket of his jeans.

 

“Your choice. I’m not making you do anything. I’d say that my price is a lot cheaper than the pharmacy’s. And no one will see you getting them.”

 

She’s so tired. She imagines that she can hear the caffeine pills crinkling in his pocket like a promise.

 

She still doesn’t know his name but she knows that his lips are chapped and gritty. She knows that he smells like fryer grease. His wolf-tooth clicks against her teeth and she pictures it scraping a groove into her incisor. She’s about to test out her new etching with the tip of her tongue when he pushes his tongue into her mouth. It’s too big in her mouth, too warm, and too soft, just sitting there like a slug. Cadavers have their jaws wired shut so their mouths don’t hang open while their families are looking into their caskets. Barbed contacts keep their eyelids from retracting and their hands are sewn together, almost like in prayer. This image alone is what fixes Shirley and stops her from pushing him away and gagging. She doesn’t open her eyes until she’s sure he’s gone.

 

He’s taken everything with him. She decides that’s probably for the best.

 

* * *

 

Something from a dream:

 

Theo’s gloves are off and her arms are rotting from the elbows down. She needs Shirley’s help. They sit side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder and she pushes her fingers into Theo’s skin like it is watermelon flesh. She pinches out small black beetles and drops them onto the floor.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

Theo doesn’t answer. Beetles scuttle over their feet.

 

Something real:

 

Nell invites Shirley to go thrift store shopping. She’d asked Theo first, of course, but Theo’d said that putting other people’s castoffs onto her body was the worst thing she could imagine. Nell pulls armfuls of clothing into the curtained changeroom and singles out a few numbers that she thinks will suit her sister. Everything she chooses for Shirley looks fine but feels wrong, like it's meant for someone who looks like her but moves through life differently. Everything that Nell tries on feels exactly right for her, like it's been handed down to her by other Nells from past lives.

 

* * *

 

A pattern of disease can be traced from Queen Victoria to Alexis Romanoff in a matter of a few straight lines. A few lines more and it reaches through into Spain and Germany, too. A curse held in blood. A recessive gene. Dates and names rattle in Shirley’s head and blur on the page.  

 

“You’re still awake?”

 

Her bedroom door is slivered open and Theo’s face is there. Shirley glances at the clock. It’s past three AM.

 

“I’m studying.”

 

Theo slips into the room and closes the door behind her. She sits on the desk behind her and takes in Shirley’s study notes, all meticulously ruled lines and colour-coded headings.

 

“You’ll have to sleep sometime if you want any of this to stick.”

 

“It’s not going to stick if you keep bothering me,” Shirley flips her notes over so Theo can stop reading them. “I’m not tired. You’re not asleep either.”

 

“I was. I just got up,” Theo says. Through the walls you could hear strains of Stevie Nicks. ‘Crystal’ will turn into ‘Say You Love Me’ followed up by ‘Landslide’ until the disc ends and loops back to track one. It’s become background noise. “It’s not like Nelly’s asleep either. You’re just usually out by now.”

 

Theo slides off the desk.

 

“And you look like shit lately.”

 

Shirley closes her books. “Great. Thanks. Now, get out of my room.”

 

The way Theo’s standing, Shirley knows that she has no plans to leave until she knows what’s going on.

 

“I’ve been having bad dreams.”

 

“It’s normal to dream,” Theo says, but it’s not a dismissal.

 

“Yeah, well, I’d rather not.”

 

“I didn’t know it was that bad.”

 

Shirley isn’t sure if it is really that bad. She doesn’t want to let herself sleep. That’s her fault. She’s so tired. That’s her fault. Theo stays and they sit on Shirley’s bed together, talking in low voices that break into laughter that they shush back into submission. Like they’re sisters in a movie. Around four AM, Theo starts to get up to go back to her own room but Shirley stops her.

 

“I don’t want to sleep alone,” she says.

 

She reaches for Theo’s hand and grips it. Theo’s glove bunches between her fingers. In the dark, her sister is the thing that is assuredly real in here room. She can make out the outline of her face in the dark, fleeting hummingbird flickers as she tries to blink back sleep.

 

Theo sighs and pulls her hand free. When she grabs Shirley’s hand again, the glove is gone. She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she remembers being surprised that Theo’s hand is so soft.

 

Shirley only wakes up once, right before her alarm clock goes off. She doesn’t remember what she’d been dreaming or even if she had be dreaming at all. Theo is still there, she is still holding her hand.

 

Her sister is crying in her sleep.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Please comment + kudos if you enjoyed!


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